Much of the food purchased for home use is stored in refrigeration units (e.g., refrigerators and freezers). However, since these refrigeration units must be opened and searched through in order to readily see the expiration dates and other information about the products stored therein, the expiration dates and other relevant dates for products stored in refrigeration units often goes unchecked. This leads to food waste and the possibility of sicknesses due to consuming expired and/or spoiled foods.
For at least these reasons, a system and method is thus needed that can readily read information on home refrigerated products and transmit this information to one or more secondary devices. Such a system and method can be used to reduce food waste that is related to product expiry and can be used more generally to control household food inventory.
Examples of related art are described below:
U.S. Pat. No. 8,077,041 describes a system for tracking store-items placed in a storage space. The system includes a plurality of wireless RFID readers distributed within the storage space such that at least one store-item, having an RFID tag attached, is within an interrogation range of at least one of the wireless RFID reader. The system further includes a monitoring server operative to communicate wirelessly with the a plurality of wireless RFID readers to obtain information collected by the plurality of wireless RFID readers from the RFID tag attached to the at least one store-item.
None of the art described above addresses all of the issues that the present invention does.